Growing data volumes and increases in regulatory compliance are requiring enterprises to evaluate their data management strategies and implement scalable solutions that solve today's challenges. Enterprise data management must also integrate into a company's existing application infrastructure and provide the means to manage data growth while maintaining referential integrity of the application.

Organic Data Growth
E-Business applications have given organization the ability to capture, analyze and retain unparalleled amounts of data about its business, customers, and suppliers. But with these systems are capturing potentially millions of transactions on a daily basis. Over time, data growth is exponential and needs to be actively managed for long term success. By many accounts, stored data in databases is doubling every other year. In addition to the daily capture of information, mergers and acquisitions are putting pressure on IT organizations to support and manage new IT systems. For industries such as High Technology and Financial Services that tend to grow through mergers, acquisition data growth can far exceed the expected organic growth rate.

Downstream Data Growth
Database applications, unlike email and file servers, require multiple copies of production systems to support test and development efforts such as creating versions for patch, test, QA, training and possibly a stand-by copy for disaster recovery purposes. On average, for every production application, IT makes eight copies for production support. As the production database grows, so do all the copies, consuming large quantities of storage. When an application or database needs to be upgraded, additional copies are required to reduce risk associated with the upgrade process. Many times, the need for storage by the database administrators (DBAs) exceeds the allocated storage and storage consumption forecasts. CIOs and IT directors struggle to reduce costs of infrastructure while keeping mission-critical database applications online, operational and current. On average, IT data centers manage at least six mission-critical applications. Multiply the number of applications by the number of copies (6 apps x 8 copies = 42 total) to meet the storage requirement, plus the servers required to support each copy, and the power to support the entire infrastructure, it is no surprise that more than 70 percent of IT budgets are allocated to the database applications even though only 20 percent of the production data is database data. Analysts estimate that email and unstructured content represents approximately 80 percent of production data.

Data Retention Requirements
Corporate policies, Government and regulatory bodies are driving data retention. For example, Healthcare data retention requirements can range from 10 years for patient records to permanent data storage for births and deaths. Sarbanes-Oxley requires corporate financial data be retained for 5 years and under Basel II, Banks needs 7 years of risk data to meet their capital requirements. These regulations were developed to ensure a proper financial and operational record of the business but put a burden on all organizations to not only retain the data but maintain accessibility. Without enterprise data management strategies, organizations will not be able to meet the requirements placed on them, and not being able to produce records is no longer a defensible strategy in regulatory actions or litigation.

Impact of Growth
The expectation of web-based enterprise applications is near instantaneous access. Unchecked data growth can affect all areas of the organization, making it impossible to fully utilize CRM, ERP, or SCM, applications, decreasing productivity and potentially impacting business performance.

Performance
Large volumes of data in the production system slow application response time and reporting processes, especially during critical times such as quarter or year-end close. The net effect of slow response times and limited reporting capability means information needed to make business decisions is limited.

Maintenance and Storage
Maintaining large database applications add complexity, risk and cost to the business. More time is needed to perform routine back-up and maintenance activities. Additionally, large databases require more storage in production and the back-office to create the multiple clones needed for test and development processes. Even though storage and CPU costs are falling, data growth will still tax the IT infrastructure beyond the ability of hardware upgrades to negate them.

Enterprise Data Management
Enterprise Data Management is a proven strategy to manage database growth in an organization. By classifying data according to its value to organization, data that needs to be highly availably can be left in the production server, while underutilized, less valuable data can be moved to more efficient, Tier 2 or lower storage tiers.

Data Archiving
With data archiving, organizations can create and deploy consistent policies for managing, securing and storing data. The result is improved application performance and availability by reallocating under-utilized or inactive data from the production database into a secure online or offline data archive. Ideally, organizations maintain access through the native enterprise application layer to ensure seamless data access for near and long term reporting requirements.

Strategy for Growth
Data growth is inevitable in any growing organization but deploying enterprise data management tools and strategies give organizations the ability to stay ahead of data growth and achieve higher application performance and lower IT costs.

How Solix's Enterprise Data Management Solutions helps?
Solix Technologies Inc. is a global provider of Enterprise Data Management software solutions for Compliance and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). The Solix Enterprise Data Management Suite enables organizations to discover, classify and manage structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and easily implement tiered storage strategies, while securing, managing and auditing confidential data for compliance and information governance.

With a global client base, Solix is considered a pioneer in providing a complete product suite to manage data across all segments (Application, Email and Documents) in an enterprise. The result is reduced risk, increased productivity and more time available to proactively focus on strategic IT initiatives.